


Dealers Choice

by StrangerxImagines



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016), Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Laura Hale, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Argent warnings, F/M, Lydia is here for like a second but not much, Peter had a plan A-revenge a plan B-resurection and plan C-Time Travel, The Upside Down, the Argents are baddies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-03 07:02:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 7,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21175355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangerxImagines/pseuds/StrangerxImagines
Summary: Laura dies in the woods, staring up at the full moon peeking through the tree tops, letting go as the world goes black around her. She wakes up in 1984 in dark murky tunnels in a town she hadn’t been to since her parent’s died and comes face to face with her nineteen year old father. Now stuck in the past Laura does her best to blend in, lying about who she is and where she comes from. Does she warn her father of his fate twenty years in the future or does she remain silent? Laura doesn’t know if changing the future might make things worse but what she does know is that the more time she spends with him the harder it is to keep her secret.(inspired by tabbytabbytabby's awesome crossover manip which got me off my keister to actually work on this idea.)





	1. 1984

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tabbytabbytabby](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabbytabbytabby/gifts).

Laura dies in the woods, staring up at the full moon peeking through the tree tops, letting go as the world goes black around her. No more pain, her heart no longer racing, no more fear. She welcomed the peace, took in one final deep breath of the familiar woods around her and died. 

But she didn’t stay dead. 

Laura breathes, the air around her is musty, smelling like dead leaves and rotted fetid wood. She turns over on her side, her eyes ache behind her eyelids, her chest feels like its caved in and her mouth tastes like dirt. She opens her eyes again, lifts her hand and sees dried rust colored blood staining her palm. The tunnel, she comes to realize what she’s in, seems to slither beneath her like a living thing and thats when she notices. She’s naked, her middle throbs and burns straight though, her skin smells like the kind of rot that comes from a decomposing body. So she had died and yet-

-and yet

Laura shuts her eyes and rests, too tired to move, in too much pain to even force it as her middle seems to be healing on the inside. Had she been torn apart and placed back together? It sure seems likely though she isn’t sure how she managed to come back to life at all. Only so few things can really kill a werewolf, fire, decapitation, dismemberment, wolfsbane. Whatever had brought her back must have used powerful magic to do it. So where were they? Had they brought her back and thrown her into some tunnel? Or was she in the belly of some monster, the slithering beneath her seemed to be all around, whatever she was in was most definitely alive. She drifts, her head feels heavy and everything aches, even if she were in a position to move theres no way that she can fight not with her organs repairing. What Laura does is listen, training her ears to hear anyone or anything that might be near but there’s nothing but the slithering. She takes in deep breaths and smells nothing but the rot of roots, dead leaves and her former decomposition. She sleeps.

* * *

Theres light shining beyond her closed eyelids, a shout that echos, warm hands lifting her and a devastatingly familiar scent that makes her heart ache. If she didn’t know any better she would think that her father was lifting her up into his arms and carrying her through the slithering tunnels. She smells his sweat, hears his heart beating, feels the smoothness of his skin as her hands come up to wrap around his neck, the hair in her face is soft and she wants to do nothing but cry. She has to be dreaming, she has to be dead for this to be real. Her father has been dead for seven years, she remembers the last day she’d seen him alive, wearing his ridiculously large glasses, his brown hair pushed back by the hairband her mother had teasingly pushed into his hair. She remembers the way he’d smiled at her as she walked into the kitchen, how he’d hugged her tightly the way he always had in the mornings and how he’d smacked a kiss on the crown of her head before she left for school that morning, Derek trailing behind her.

Laura’s father is dead, when she saw him again it was to identify him, he’d been horribly burned with a tell tale sign of a bullet hole in his shoulder, his brown eyes dull and dead. Laura’s father is dead-

-Laura’s father is alive.

* * *

"Holy shit!" Dustin says again for the umpteenth time, his panic palpable in the tunnels as the group pushes through, Mike at the helm as they quickly race towards the exit, holding the flashlight to light their way trying to be brave in the face of total uncertainty. They'd lit the fire they had to get out but the naked woman in Steve's arms was hurt and crying softly and none of the children knew what to do to ease her discomfort. She was covered in dried blood and she smelled like a corpse but she was alive. 

"Holy shit!"

"Dustin can you shut up!"

They reach the opening, the kids climbing out with Steve's help as he eases the girl softly to lay on the slithering ground, as he is about to lift Dustin out he hears them, the monsters rushing back. Theres nothing he can do but try to ease Dustin and the girl out of the tunnel, he'd die, he knew that, but dying in the place of someone else had to be better than dying for nothing, or so he thought. Before he can lift Dustin he sees them, Dustin screams, the end, Steve thinks, this is it. He's going to die with Dustin and some unnamed girl. He reaches for her, holding her at the waist and grabbing Dustin. The demo dogs, shuffling past at top speed hitting them hard enough to nearly knock them over. Steve sighs in relief when they're gone. He places the girl on the ground, lifts Dustin and wonders, looking back at her, how to get her limp body out of the tunnel.

"Steve!" Lucas puts out a hand alongside Max. It takes some patience but the kids manage to pull her out and Steve crawl out a moment after, breathing heavily, his face aching and his lips bleeding again. He wants a cigarette, he hasn't wanted one in a long time but now he could use one. He lifts the girl as the kids follow him to Hargrove's car and he sets her in the passenger seat, pulling off his filthy jacket and carefully pulling it on her, doing up the buttons trying to protect the modesty she no longer has. 

"How the hell did she wind up down there?" He asks himself as Max goes to the trunk and pulls out an old gym bag.

"These are clean," She says pulling a pair of sweat pant out of the bag that she then tosses into the trunk. "Lets get this on her." 

She has no identification, she smells like death and she's covered in dried blood but there is something so familiar about her. Theres an old picture on his mantle back home, a faded black and white picture of his father's mother that the girl reminds him of. The same short nose, the same stubborn brown and long curling lashes. He wonders if her eyes would be just as blue. He's delirious, exhausted and seeing things. "Lets get back to the house."

"But Billy!" 

He'd forgotten about Hargrove. The kids climb into the car and Steve settles in the drivers seat, taking deep calming breaths as he digs through the glove compartment for a what he hopes is at least a stray cigarette. He's not disappointed, crookedly grinning as he pushes the lighter in the dash and waits for it to pop, a cigarette hanging limply at his lips.

"We'll drive to my car and Max can take this piece of shit back to the Byers place for her brother."

"We can't leave her alone with him." Lucas pipes in along with the other kids. 

"No shit. She's gonna drop off the car, leave the keys in the ignition and then I'll take her home. Obviously. I don't want to leave her alone with that psychopath."

He starts the car, giving the mystery girl one last long look and drives off into the night.

* * *

Laura had dreamed. She hasn't dreamed in a long time not since before the fire, every night falling into a dead and tired sleep and waking to nothing in the morning but this night she dreams. She wonders if its because she's come back and smelled her father that she's dreaming. She turns over in the unfamiliar bed that smells like flowery detergent, teenage boy and lets herself drift away from her dream into waking life. The dream, however lingers, the smell of her father, seeing his face smiling at her, welcoming her home.

Laura's father died a long time ago but now she couldn't help but feel the pull of pack, like he was right beside her.

"You're awake." An unfamiliar voice says and Laura's eyes open and come to focus on a tired looking older man sitting in the chair beside the bed. She sits up, slowly, her middle still throbbing, and takes in the room. The wood paneled walls are covered in old movie posters, there is an ancient sound system across the room and a dresser filled with balled up papers and knick knacks.

Laura _has_ seen this bedroom before, in an old picture in one of her fathers photo albums. There had been a boy in the picture about seventeen, with thin brown eyes and an awkward smile. An old friend of her father's from back home, he'd said, someone he hadn't seen in a long time. She wishes that she had asked the boys name, had asked for any of the names in that album, now that she thinks about it but she'd just been a little girl sitting other fathers knee as he looked through old albums recalling times that had passed him by and of people he hadn't seen since he was twenty. 

"Where am I?" She croaks, her thought feels like its on fire. She clears it, sitting up too quickly. The scents here are all wrong and unfamiliar. She smells and tastes the bitter tang of faded gasoline, of sweaty teenage boy and stale cigarette smoke but the scent of death on her skin mingles with the familiar scent of pack of her father and she finds her aching heart beating fast. She doesn't know this man but maybe she might remember his face, if she tries to remember those albums and her father nostalgically recalling the old days.

The man lights a cigarette and leans back.

* * *

TBC


	2. 2011

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek can't find her. Derek had buried Laura, had put her back together and had buried her in the ground and now...she was gone. The scent of two teenage boys-the new wold and his chatty friend, lingers at the now opened gravesite and Derek sees red. What possible reason could they have to steal his sisters corpse?

Derek can't find her. Derek had buried Laura, had put her back together and had buried her in the ground and now...she was gone. The scent of two teenage boys-the new wolf and his chatty friend, lingers at the now opened gravesite and Derek sees red. What possible reason could they have to steal his sisters corpse? He feels the shift, anger overriding his senses as his ears come to points, his teeth elongate and his claws break the skin of his fisted palms. Sweat rolls down his forehead, his breath comes in pants as he takes in every scent he can; the moist rich soil mixed with ash, the scent of old death and brunt wood from the house, the scent of the two teenagers, even the scent of the alpha that had killed her lingers as he takes in deep heady breaths. Derek tips his head back and lets out a guttural, rage filled howl that shakes the forest around them, every single creature within them going quiet all at once, terrified by the sound he emits. He crouches, control is hard to maintain with Laura dead, his anchor no longer keeping him human. He follows the scents back towards the opening of the preserve where dirt meets road, they'd sperated here the wolf going on way and the boy going the other.

He follows the boys scent, too angry to drive, too filled with rage to take cover in the woods and he charges down the road, all he can do is think of Laura, the day she'd said goodbye, the night he found her and had scoured for the other part of her, in the morgue. It had been tricky, getting into the morgue and taking her other half and stealing away in the cover of the night but he'd been able to do so, bringing her back home. He remembers staring at the house, closing his eyes and making himself remember the days when it was alive, the sound of his little sister laughing, his mothers howls and his father singing off key int he kitchen. 

His fault, all of it, he knows that. Derek had been a stupid kid, always thinking with his heart, like his father his mother used to say, all heart very little common sense. When he was a kid he was glad to be compared to him, his father had met his mother after all, had settled down with an alpha and had strong pups with her, was happy. When Derek met Paige he thought that he could have the same thing but then he'd listened to Peter and had eventually asked him to talk to Ennis and then everything went to shit. Paige didn't take to the bite and was dying and Derek had killed her. He wonders often if Paige's ghost had cursed him, it would certainly seem so with everything that happened so soon after meeting and killing her.

Kate had come a month later, a beautiful whirlwind filled with lies and danger and he'd fallen so hard for her, needing someone to ease the pain of what he'd done and because he lacked the common sense to really think about his relationship with Kate and think about her questions he'd lost nearly his entire family. Laura had called him stupid, when he told her about Paige and had shut him down when he mentioned Kate. Laura had told him that blaming a dead girls curse was futile. In the end the things that happened were beyond anyones control, yes he lacked sense and it had set the fire into motion but Paige had nothing to do with it. Laura said that she didn't blame him.

But she did, just a little bit, he knows it. When they'd been called to the station, when they'd been told what happened and when Laura had been taken to the morgue to identify the one body that could be identified without the use of dental records she'd come out of that room and stared right through him and therein he saw hate. Maybe being like his father, all heart little common sense, was a bad thing that had not done his father any favors. Sure, he'd met the love of his life, had pups he could be proud of and a wonderful life but it had been cut short.

Laura had seen their fathers corpse, the fire had changed them both but he can't imagine seeing him laid out on a slab, badly burnt and dead, the lone human in the house who always laughed and sang and made his mother more human by just breathing. Derek had killed them.

The house comes to view and Derek stops thinking about his dead family, his sorrow turning again to hot anger as he rounds the house. He climbs up its side and stalks quietly across the roof the the lone opened window with the light on. Only the boy is home and Derek knows that the boy won't comet of it alive as he eases himself inside of the room. The boys back is turned towards him as he taps away at his keyboard. Derek takes in the scent of the room, musty socks, sweaty teenager and fresh soil. The boys sneakers are caked in it, set forgotten next to the bedroom door. Derek sees red as he grabs the back of the boys shirt and slams him, hard, against the wall next to his desk. The boy yelps, terrified. 

"Where is she?!" Derek growls, his eyes blazing so hotly and brightly that he can see the blue glimmer against the boys face. He can smell how terrified the boy is, sour fear and a little bit of urine. Good. 

"I-I don't know what you're talking about!"

Derek slams him again, hard enough to make him dizzy and wince with a little pain but not hard enough to cause real damage. Derek doesn't really care, already knows that whatever happens here tonight means his death, he has every intention of finding out where his sisters body is and killing the boy right here. He doesn't care about the Argents in town or about the code, not anymore not when their sister had killed his entire family and had hunted him and Laura for so long they could never settle. For his own stupidity. He will find Laura, burry her and go to the Argent's with a feeling of peace, offer his life to them and let himself be but in half. They could do whatever horrible things they wanted with his body he deserved to be laid to waste and forgotten like trash but not Laura, never Laura, who deserved nothing more than to be alive.

"I swear to God!"

"You were there!" Derek says through sharpened teeth, his mouth filling with saliva at the thought of ripping the boys throat out. He comes in close to him, Derek lets the shift change his face, slowly, watching as the remaining color in the boys face completely drain as he began to truly struggle. "I could smell you over her grave, I can still smell the dirt on your shoes. "He points towards the door, the boys horrified eyes slowly move towards the shoes. "What did you do to her?"

"N-nothing I swear to God we did nothing to her!"

"You dug her up!"

"And there was nothing there, dude, she was gone!"

And it's the truth, Derek listens as the boy speaks and cannot find any kind of a lie in his heartbeat. A dead end. He eases his grip, his face contorting and changing back but his eyes remain blue, the light dimming in them significantly as he walks towards the boys bed and sits at the edge, cradling his face in his hands trying to breathe. Someone else had taken Laura. She was really gone.

The boy slides down the wall, sits with his knees drawn up breathing evenly and for the longest moment there is no sound, everything is overwhelmingly terrible for both of them, the boy knows he was close to death and Derek knows that there is no Laura to be found, possibly ever again. His fault, its always Derek's fault. He could have called it in when he found the upper half of her body, the morgue could have taken her and put her back together. There would have been a human funeral where she would have been placed beside her father and the ashes of their family but that had seemed wrong. Something had told Derek that the old ways were how it was supposed to be and in listening to his instincts he had failed her once again.

"We thought you killed her."

"Kid-"

"Stiles." The boy-Stiles says. "You tried to kill me, use my name."

"I didn't kill my sister I wasn't in Beacon Hills when she died." 

"So you didn't bite Scott."

"No, and even if I did there's no way I could have changed him."


	3. 1984

Laura runs out of the house and into the woods on her bare feet. The sun blazes brightly, stinging her eyes, her body still aches but she runs, trying to clear her head trying to stop her panic. The man, Jim, had asked her about inter dimensional monsters, too strange to believe and Laura, who wasn't human herself found it all very hard to believe. But that wasn't why she ran.

Jim, the man had introduced himself as, had offered Laura coffee, that's why she left the room. The mug that was handed to her was warm, the aroma welcoming. Three days, she thought of the three days she'd spent dreaming about her father, the scent of him still lingering in her nostrils, the feel of his skin and hair. Laura had hallucinated, she had to have, her father was dead. She had sat at the table, thinking of her father, had finished her coffee and as she placed her mug down on the wooden surface she saw a newspaper.

And thats when she had fled.

In woods unfamiliar Laura feels herself nearly collapse. It couldn't be real, she knew that, it was impossible but so was Laura herself, dead but not.

"Hawkins Indiana." She says to herself. Laura was in her father's home town and what was worse yet she had landed twenty seven years in the past. She dry heaves, bends forward, her hands on her knees. "Oh God."

Laura wouldn't be born for another two years, the same year her mother blows into town. Laura knows this because her father had always been sappy and always recalled the day he met her mother remembering everything, right down to the color of the dress she'd worn, poetically recalling the day that she had changed his life.

That meant that her father _had_ found her, had saved her and was alive. 

Laura's father was alive!

Her heaving stops when the tears come, her heart aching, remembering the man she'd known who died had, as he had always promised, been there for her when she needed or most. He hadn't even known that he had kept that promise he was just a boy now. Laura's father was only eighteen. He hadn’t even made that promise yet.

"Hey!" Jim comes to a stop, braces his hands on his knees and breathes. His heart stutters in his chest from his run in the woods, trying to find the strange girl to his own detriment. She watches him, takes in his scent, cologne, deodorant, cigarette smoke, stale beer and coffee.

"Shit, you're fast. You wanna tell me what the hell that was all about?"

”I don’t know where to start.” She doesn’t. Laura died in her family’s territory and had woken up underground in some strange tunnel. There were monsters. Her dead father wasn’t quite dead yet and had saved her life. She was twenty seven years in the past having somehow come back to life and dragged through time and miles away from home. It shouldn’t be possible, Laura should be dead but here she was, barefoot and breathing the air of the woods in Hawkins, a place her father had fled at the first opportunity and had never returned to again.

”How about a name. You can start there.”

”Laura,” She pauses a bit. Her parents had hyphenated their names and she can remember coming to Hawkins with Derek after their parents died to stay with her grandparents, had remembered introducing herself and getting somber looks, people had known her dad, of course they did it was a small town but the name Harrington seemed to carry more weight. She was certain that it still would. “Hale.” She says, no one knows her mother here. “My name is Laura Hale.”

”Well, Laura Hale you wanna tell me why you ran out of the house?”

”I don’t know if I can.”

Would it make the future worse, if she told this man where she came from and what happens in the future? Would he believe her? The look in his shrewd eyes tells her that he might be opened to the truth, maybe he would doubt it but he wouldn't exactly dismiss her. He mentioned monsters and another world so what would happen if she told him who and what she was? But Laura knows that he would panic, that he would pull out the gun that he’s hiding under her zipped jacket and try to shoot. Anyone with any sort of sense and an gun would.

If she were a good person she might not try to change the future either, the consequences could be worse if she does but then she feels the tell tale strands of her father’s hair and remembers his panicked beating heart as he carried her, someone who was a stranger to him without thinking twice, to safety and she knows that she can’t afford to be good or kind. Laura is going to be selfish she knows she will be.

”Listen kid-“

”No,” She takes a breath, shakes her head and hugs herself. “I...I can tell you. I can tell you everything I just don’t think you’ll believe me.”

”Kid I just told you about monsters. You were found in a literal hell tunnel. Theres not a whole lot I wont believe.”

The woods are alive around them, its a crisp October morning and Laura Hale stands barefoot in the dirt staring at a man twenty seven years ago. She lets out a small breath of a laugh and looks him straight in the eye.

”Do you believe in werewolves?”


	4. 1984

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short update heavy on Jim Hopper.

Jim doesn’t know what to say, leaning back against his chair, the piles of paperwork left forgotten at his desk as he smokes and thinks of the things Laura Hale had told him. He’d managed to get her into his cruiser and had driven her to his cabin, El, thankfully had kept to herself curiously watching them from the sofa as he led Laura into El’s bedroom. As she sat and then cradled her face in her hands to cry Jim had been left with a feeling of, not foreboding or fear or even disbelief, but of sympathy for her. Great sympathy for the things that she had said and what she had showed him, knowing that she felt alone, lost, confused and heart broken. The werewolf thing was hard enough to believe but she’d asked him if he believed and hadn’t even waited for his response before the color of her blue eyes changed to deep alarming red and then, with those red eyes she began to speak, unable to hold the tide.

What was unbelievable was the time travel that her story involved or at the very least the little of it that she herself had no choice but to believe. After all, how could she deny it if she wound up nearly thirty years in the past and very far away from California where she had died. Another thing, even harder to believe, that she had been dead and then had woken up in the tunnels. He had asked her if she had ever had a connection to it and her only response was that it had to do with her father, whom she hadn’t even known knew about the supernatural or monsters until he’d met her mother in 1986. 

‘Your dad?’ He’d asked her curiously and she had faltered for only a second and it was only now that he understood that she was trying to sort through her grief. 

‘He was there that night,’ She had said. ‘He saved my life.’

Theres a bottle of scotch tucked into one of the locked drawers of his desk and he liberates it taking slows but deep sips because those kids had saved her life but the only one who could be her father, if the math is to be believed, was Steve Harrington and that was just...bananas wasn’t it? That one of their own was destined to get into the muck of monster bullshit no matter what. There was more that she wasn’t telling him, not in the woods anyway so he’d walked her back to Joyce’s and had helped her into his cruiser and took her to the only logical place for the talk. His place. What she told him left him a little cold, a fire that had killed everyone but herself, her little brother and her comatose uncle. The girl was from 2011, her family had been dead for near seven years. Harrington survived all of this and no matter what he was doomed to die anyway. That did leave Jim cold, a little shocked and weary for the kid he hardly knew in person, caught in the muck of monsters but before that known by his fathers name and the few times he’d been caught running a red.

But thinking about Laura and her connection to Harrington and Jim thinks that he can kind of see the resemblance. Kind of. The hair maybe, the lanky tall frame she wore with her broad shoulders and the jut of her chin. She laughed when she caught him staring at her face.

’Everyone used to say that we took after mom but theres a picture of my great grandmother and I look a lot like her, Derek had her eyes but our hair is such a disaster that it takes forever to get it set just right. Derek let his hair grow out in middle school and he looked like a floppy mess but Cora had his eyes.’ She said through some tears because Cora, the baby sister Jim realized, had burned to death in the house in the future. ‘They didn’t ever find her body, you know. I always wondered about dad being shot that maybe he got her out but we didn’t find her so she died in the house. But they never found her.’

Jim had asked Laura why she had told him her entire history, was it dangerous trying to change the future but Laura had looked pale, weary and angry when she responded that nothing could be worse than being without them.

’What if you’re never born?’

’Better to not be born than to suffer like this.’

And that had been the end of that, Laura laid down on El’s bed and turned her back to him staring at the wall, the conversation had taken a lot out of her and he understood that she needed some time to herself. The full moon, he realized now when he looked outside, it was nearing six o’clock, was visible in the darkening blue sky and round, it was tonight.

The phone rings as his insides turn cold and churn. 

“She’s okay.” El says on the line, like she’d heard him through the miles between them and maybe she had. “She’s sleeping Jim, shes okay.”

The line cuts and he believes the little girl with super powers left alone in a cabin in the woods with a mythological monster who could, from legend, rend men limb from limb. But he trusted her judgment, he had to. He leans back, the clacking back to the receiver and he lets himself think about the future, of monsters and werewolves. Life, it seemed, was bullshit.


	5. February 1985

Time pushes forward, days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months as Laura hides in the cabin in the woods trying with all her might to stay away. Jim and his daughter had convinced her that it would be best to stay hidden, they didn’t want her to fall into the hands of the lab. She tries to remember if there had been any packs near by in this time and finds that there are none, just like in her time. She had always found it odd, Hawkins was the perfect place for a pack of wolves to live and hide from hunters in but now knowing what she knows about monsters and scientists that were more monster than people she’s starting to understand why the supernatural had stayed away. So what had brought her mother here to begin with?

She passes the time reading and hunting and scouting the territory for anything unnatural not because anyone asks her but because she wants to, grateful that she is being given a place to stay for now until they figure out how to either get her home or to permanently place her. Jane had asked Laura what it was like back home and Laura, so smitten with the dark haired cherub who reminded her of Cora and what Cora might have been had she ever reached that age, had said lonely and dark. Jane had nodded seeming to understand that loneliness and had pat her cheek before changing the channel of the television.

It had been lonely, even with Derek constantly with her. Laura had been so terribly lonely and depressed forcing herself to get up each and every morning with a smile just to face the day because if she didn’t then Derek would wallow and stop talking all over again and the last time he’d done that Laura had caught him with a canister of gasoline and a match ready to end it all because of the guilt. She wonders if Derek is alive now, if he hadn’t died looking for her and stayed permanently dead. The thought of Derek being torn in half had woken her from her sleep and Laura had gone back to the tunnels using her nose to find the location.

It was dead, after she dug into it, there were burnt carcasses of monsters and the living vines had withered and shrunken. Jim had said it was dead but she had needed to see it for herself knowing that if she accepted that it was dead that she would have to accept that her only possible way home was dead too. That night, after the nightmare she had gone looking for Derek in the tunnels wondering if he’d died and come back just like her but had found nothing but fetid rot and death. 

And a new scent that she couldn’t place.

“You’re filthy.” Jim says when she trudges up the rickety porch steps come morning covered head to toe in filth and dirt. “I told you not to go there.”

”I know.” She says. “I just needed to see for myself.” She doesn’t mention the nightmare about Derek and how she had been looking for him. The Derek that she knew was gone and would only appear in her world again in 1989 when he would be born and even then she wouldn’t get the chance of seeing him because by then both her parents would be gone from Indiana never to come back again.

”I know that we talked about you hiding out here.” He says through cigarette smoke. “But I know it gets pretty lonely being all cooped up by yourself.”

”I make do.” She says. “I hunt, I scout the territory, I read.” 

“Even so,”

”I know.” Laura nods. “I guess I’m just afraid of what it will mean if I go out there and live. My life up until this point has been a series of moving pictures, one motel room after the other, never staying in one place long enough to be found and trying to keep my idiot brother from setting himself on fire. Last night, I thought maybe Derek would have been in there.”

”Shit.”

”Yeah. Shit.”

”Do you think he’s dead?”

Laura doesn’t know. It’s possible that he is, Peter hadn’t exactly been kind when he’d torn her to shreds for the alpha power but then Laura hadn’t exactly fought him hard enough to live, she’d been so tired of running and taking care of Derek and of crying and wishing that she’d just stayed home that day and died. Peter had been crying, through his impassive face showing no emotion he couldn't hide the streaming of tears and the regret in his eyes and Laura wonders how different her life would have been had she said yes and followed him on his path to revenge.

She had been sorely tempted to say yes when he’d found her in the woods, how he had all the necessary information to find the Argents at their most weakest and kill them and she might have done it had she not seen the picture of the girl. She was beautiful with long dark hair and wide brown eyes, she had reminded Laura of a fairy tale and she had said no. What was done to them was done by Kate, she would kill Kate but not the rest. Peter hadn’t liked that dismissal and had killed Laura because of her rejection.

She tells Jim all of this, leaning against a wooden beam and staring off into the woods.

”You’re a bigger person than I would have been.” He says honestly. “I’ve lost...I lost someone to illness and it near destroyed me I can’t imagine losing them to something like that and not going after the people who killed them.”

”My mother was a good alpha, she was strict but fair but in all honesty I think if she’d been in my place she would have done it, but my dad,” She clears her throat. “My dad made her softer, you know, more human and I thought of the people that they were when they died and how my mother would have wanted to do it but wouldn't have because of my dad. Even in that family there are innocent people who wont deserve dying that way.”

She thinks of the girl, of her sister and her parents and wonders if she made a mistake. 


	6. Chapter 6

Laura has a job. She wakes up every morning with a purpose even if it is renting videos and shelving them and handling annoying kids and mothers over burdened with screaming children. Its been a long time since she’d done anything that required her to be with people face to face for more than an hour, she was used to stealing and swindling and then running out of towns when she and Derek had enough money to get by to the next shady motel. They had money, a lot of it but it hadn’t been safe to use any of it always wondering when Kate would come looking for them to finish what she had started. 

But Kate wouldn’t be formidable for a long time and though she is tempted to find the witch and kill her Laura isn’t so keen in mutilating a five year old even if said five year old would grow into the twenty five year old woman who would seduce her fifteen year old brother and then burn their family to ashes. Still, when Laura takes the time to think about Kate she is sorely tempted to find her, child or not, and end it. Eat her? Mutilate her? Tear out her little throat and make it quick?

The door opens and chimes and Laura puts on a smile, strained, as she greets the customer a regular that makes her want to laugh and groan all at once. He’s attractive, the kind of boy she would have gone crazy over when she was in high school with his rough demeanor and his dreamy blue eyes but his hair is a major turn off even if its starting to grow out of its mullet and his grin is sharp and mean. He reminds her of Peter too, teetering on the edge of badness, so close to tearing someones throat out with his teeth, and if she didn’t smell the human on him she would have pegged him for a coyote, he seemed the type. A loner, a wanderer. Lethal.

But Billy Hargrove underneath all of those hard layers, the sprayed to hell golden mullet, the sharp toothy grins and a;; of his innuendo was still just a kid that seemed lost. He smelled depressed most days, the scent barely covered by the near overpowering scent of cologne that always made her sneeze. Laura usually humored him too, let him flirt and would roll her eyes and insult him, but it was all in good fun, she noticed that Billy figured he would get nowhere with her ever but enjoyed the hunt even if he would come up empty. She figured that he was lonely and it was something she could appreciate.

”Hey beautiful.” He leans against the counter and makes his eyes lidded, runs his tongue along his teeth, extra cheesy today, Laura notices and rolls her eyes. “Busy?”

”Do I look busy?”

The video store is dead most afternoons, usually there would be two maybe three stragglers walking aimlessly down the rows looking for something to peek their interest before they ducked into the adult section. Laura knew the type by now, the manager of the grocery store always came in and took an hour before he went into the special section, came with his rental, made no eye contact as she paper bagged his tapes and then power walked out of the store. There were a few of the more brazen housewives that came in too but these women Laura liked because they went directly for what they wanted and made great conversation, not ashamed of what they needed.

Today the store was dead, Laura at the register, her teenage manager in the back snoring and now Billy flirting playfully with her. 

“Kid, don’t you have better things to do?”

”Like what?”

”I don’t know, isn’t there some girl whose skirt you’re just dying to get under?”

”Well-” He leans forward a bit more and lazily grins.

”No.” Laura flicks his ear and laughs when he laughs. 

“I was actually passing through,” He says and then pulls out a folded piece of paper. “Found this on the bulletin board at the grocery.”

”Whats that?”

”An application. They need lifeguards.”

”Anything to get as naked as humanly possible in public. Its perfect.”

It means that she wont be seeing him as much, he tells her with face sadness and Laura flicks him again. It’s a little disheartening, the kid is funny and sleazy and normal and she might just miss his little flirtations. She craves the normal too, the little voice in head tells her sounding an awful like her brother. Laura bites her cheek.

”You gotta promise to visit, princess.”

”The pool? Sure, I’ll purposefully dip myself in chlorinated pee water just to take a gander at your gangly ass in short shorts and a whistle. Oh the temptation.”

”So I’ll be seeing you?”

”Only so I can see you save someone and ruin your hair, Billy. The humidity alone is going to make you look like cotton candy.”

”Stop being a bitch.”

”Never.”

* * *

Just because Laura is trying her best to stay away from her father doesn’t mean that she isn’t keeping tabs on him. In a year and a half he’ll meet her mother and nine months after that Laura will be born-or not, she doesn’t know whether or not to stop them from meeting yet. Laura knows, when she lets herself acknowledge it, that this passed timeline and hers have to be separated. Maybe a new timeline started when she landed in the past, the what that happened splintering off to a new timeline different from hers because she knows for a fact that her father would have told her in the future-her past as a teenage and would have stopped Derek from meeting Kate.

Her brain hurts when she thinks about it and her heart aches when she realizes that there may or may not be a way to change her own future at all so she doesn’t let herself think about it. What she does do is keep tabs on her dad, getting the information from Jim who is the only one who really knows. His daughter knows that she isn’t human but doesn’t seem to understand Laura’s connection to Steve Harrington and is kind enough to to ask. Jim gives her all the information that she needs, a little desperate in his own way to keep tabs of her dad at all times trying to figure out what Laura might want to try to do, scare her mother off when she does blow into town so that her parents never meet and she, Derek and Cora are never born which would mean no fire or whatever else she might try to do to change his future for the better.

She finds herself at the mall, following her nose she catches the sweet scent of ice cream and so she pushes through the crowd of people and catches sight of those familiar and those not, some people who recognized her from the video rental nod in hello to her and Laura smiles and nods back. She takes the escalator and...has to give herself a moment not to burst out laughing.

Her dad has always been a bit of a good, gangly and tall with a big head and even bigger hair, he was loud and expressive and currently...dressed in a sailor uniform and not even a cool one with a little white had that makes him seem even lamer than he would have been without it.


	7. Chapter 7

Currently under construction. This will all be rewritten to fit a bit better I mean its not great and terribly edited. It needs sprucing. 


End file.
